


All the Better (a.k.a. Little Red Riding Hoodie)

by notaverse



Category: Johnny's Entertainment, KAT-TUN (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Community: hc_bingo, M/M, Minor Character Death, Shapeshifting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-13
Updated: 2011-11-13
Packaged: 2017-10-26 01:09:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/276890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notaverse/pseuds/notaverse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>If you go down to the woods today you're in for a big surprise.</i> Beautiful young men have been going missing in the woods lately. Unfortunately, Jin's mother didn't know that when she sent him off to deliver a food parcel to his grandmother.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All the Better (a.k.a. Little Red Riding Hoodie)

**Author's Note:**

> **Title:** All the Better (a.k.a. Little Red Riding Hoodie)  
>  **Fandom:** KAT-TUN  
>  **Rating:** G  
>  **Genre:** Fairytale fluff, pre-slash  
>  **Disclaimer:** Not mine, damnit  
>  **A/N:** This time 'Little Red Riding Hood' gets the Akame treatment, with a nod to a few other things on the side. Contains the death of a minor (original) character, various members of KAT-TUN as animals, and some really improbable leaps of logic. Written for hc_bingo: 'unwanted transformation' square.

Everyone knew you shouldn't go walking in the woods by yourself - everyone except Akanishi Jin's mother, who'd apparently missed out on the memo that said it was a really, really bad idea to send your son into dark wooded areas with a care package for his grandmother and nothing save his wits for protection. Jin protested with all his might but his mother was immune to his charms. She didn't care that he might be coming down with a cold and probably shouldn't go out, oh no. She laughed when he claimed he had to wash his hair. She didn't even crumble when he played his trump card and insisted he didn't have time to go out because he was too busy composing a song for her birthday.

Of course her birthday wasn't for another five months, but that was beside the point. It was dark in the woods, even during the day, and easy to lose sight of the path. The woods were haunted too, Ryo had told him once, but Jin wasn't sure if that was true or if his friend was just messing with his head. It wouldn't have been the first time.

Nobody else had a grandmother crazy enough to live in the middle of nowhere. When Yamapi wanted to see his relatives, all he had to do was walk two blocks. Ryo only had to go next door.

But not Jin's grandmother, who had obviously chosen her new home while under the influence of considerably more than her usual apple cider. Even the postman refused to go out there anymore, which was why Jin had been given the unenviable task of delivering his mother's homemade delicacies to a woman he hadn't seen in five years and who hadn't liked him back then anyway because she didn't think 'musician' was a suitably manly career aspiration for a teenage boy. Jin was in no rush to resume her acquaintance.

His mother had other ideas. She gave him a set of directions and a bag to sling over his shoulder and told him to get a move on or he wouldn't be back in time for dinner. Resigned to his fate and reluctant to miss a meal, Jin donned his favourite red A&F hoodie ("Akanishi & Fujigaya" - his parents ran a clothing store with the next-door neighbours) and made a start for the woods.

He had to pass through the centre of town first. Yamapi spotted him as he passed by the convenience store and waved him over. When Jin explained his mission, Yamapi's eyes locked on the bag.

"You're carrying _food_?"

"It's not for you." Jin was mildly irritated that his best friend hadn't immediately volunteered to join him on the trek. "But if you keep me company, you can come over for dinner tonight."

"Tempting," and the reluctance in Yamapi's voice was probably real, given how much he liked Mrs. Akanishi's cooking, "but I can't. I'm supposed to be babysitting all afternoon."

"Who is it this time?"

Yamapi shrugged. "My neighbour's adopted kids again; I can't keep up with them. He asked me to teach them all about make-up and glitter so I'm out here getting supplies."

Hearing Yamapi's plans for the afternoon made Jin feel better about his own. Adopting kids was all very well, but Takizawa Hideaki took it to extremes. His house was beginning to resemble an orphanage.

Even so, an afternoon of chaos was preferable to one spent lost in the woods. "Sure you don't want to swap?" Jin offered.

"And deprive you of the pleasure of seeing your grandmother again?"

Jin grimaced; Yamapi knew full well how he felt about his grandmother. "Maybe I'll get mauled by a wolf on the way and won't have to see her."

They both laughed, but Yamapi's amusement faded first. "Be careful that doesn't happen. All sorts of strange things go on outside town. Got cigarettes on you?"

"Yeah." Jin produced a pack from the pocket of his hooded top. "Why? So I can stab would-be attackers in the eyes with a lit one?"

Yamapi popped the lid, extracting a cigarette before Jin could snatch them away. "No, because I'm all out. But that's a good idea, though. Ryo says there are ghosts in the woods."

It was widely known that Jin did not like ghosts one bit. "I'm not sure how far I'll get trying to burn something that doesn't have any physical presence, Pi..."

Before they could get into a debate about the non-corporeal nature of the spirit world, Yamapi's younger sister showed up to deliver a long list of things their mother wanted him to pick up while he was out, and Jin took his leave. It was obvious he wasn't going to find any company for the journey. None of his other friends were around, or even the people he didn't like that much but would've been willing to put up with if it meant he didn't have to go walking through haunted woods alone.

Ghosts didn't really exist, did they? Jin wasn't sure. He made his way to the very edge of town, where trees stretched for as far as the eye could see and smooth concrete gave way to worn dirt paths, strewn with leaves and stones, twisting into dark oblivion beyond. There was no helping it. He had to go. If he ditched the parcel and stayed out of sight for a few hours his mother would know, somehow, because she always did, and she'd probably send him back with one three times the weight.

With a last, longing look at civilisation, he turned and took his first step into the woods. The first dozen weren't so bad, when he could still turn and see the walls of the town through leafy curtains. The second dozen weren't too awful either, when he could still hear the faint sounds of the big clock tower bell chiming noon.

But by the twenty-fifth step, the trees had closed themselves behind him and Jin knew home was further away than it should be. Branches crossed like swords over the path, ready to cut him down if he tried to turn back. He could only follow the path, now.

He clutched his mother's written directions in his left hand. "Follow the path straight until you reach the blasted oak," the first line read. He thought she'd been cussing the tree until she explained that the old oak tree had been struck by lightning some years ago. The poor thing was now split down the middle and quite distinctive, she said. Jin hoped that last part was true because daylight was rather limited, filtered as it was through the foliage, and he didn't want to miss anything. One wrong turn and he'd be hopelessly lost.

Getting lost wasn't an option. Just because he couldn't hear anything save the sound of his own footsteps didn't mean there wasn't anything out there, just waiting for him to stray from the path. Ghosts? Wolves? Kidnappers? He'd never know until it was too late.

Step by step, twigs crunching beneath his boots. As much as Jin wanted to shove his hands in his pockets as he walked he didn't dare, lest he trip on the uneven ground. He didn't think his mother would accept that excuse for the loss of her carefully-prepared food parcel.

He kept up a steady pace, trying to keep his eyes fixed on the path ahead rather than the surrounding shade, soon reaching the oak. The tree evoked no pity in him. Horror, yes. Pity, no. The great, gaping maw in the centre of the massive trunk ensured that. Thick, twisted branches tangled towards the ground on both sides, creating two narrow arches, each guarding a fork of the path.

Jin checked the instructions. They weren't very helpful. According to his mother, both paths led to the same place, but they only led to where you were going if you knew which one to take.

"How am I supposed to know which one to take?" he muttered to himself. Peering through the arches didn't show him anything but identical dark paths beyond.

"Most people ask the guardian."

Jin whirled around to find a medium-brown bear behind him, standing far too close for comfort - even if he was making useful suggestions. He wasn't a particularly tall bear; nor was he excessively short. In fact, if Jin was honest about it, they were probably the same height. So much for all the talking bears having left the area decades ago. Talking animals tended to keep to themselves, not blending terribly well with either humans or their less articulate kin.

"Uh...guardian?" Jin asked tentatively. He had no idea of the correct etiquette when talking to bears, and if the bear's teeth were as big as his nose, Jin didn't want to be on the wrong end of them.

"I'm the guardian," the bear said. Jin hadn't expected his voice to be so clear, but he didn't have much experience with talking animals. "Nakamaru."

"Na _kuma_ ru?"

"Nakamaru. I suppose you're one of those heroes looking for tragic princesses to save?"

Jin shook his head. "I'm just going to deliver some food to my grandmother. Do you know which path I'm supposed to take?"

"What's your name?"

"Akanishi Jin."

Nakamaru consulted a list he extracted from a hole in the trunk, giving a little "Ah!" when he found Jin's name. "It says here that I'm allowed to let you pass in safety if you can help me with my problem."

What kind of problems did a bear have, Jin wondered? "What's the alternative?"

"You choose your own path and get trapped in the darkness for all eternity."

Jin smiled brightly. "So what's your problem?"

They sat down on tree stumps while Nakamaru explained the situation. The unfortunate bear was homeless. He'd had an agreement with a couple of other bears to move into a nice cottage in the woods, with a sweet little pond and an open fireplace, but on the day he'd gone to move in, they'd supplanted him with another roommate. He wasn't big enough, they said. He wasn't small enough, they said. And they already had a guy who was just right.

Confused and annoyed, Nakamaru had lost the argument when the usurper had challenged him to a battle of bravery over the room. It was a nice place, to be sure, but not worth the risk of bungee-jumping from the nearest clock tower. He'd taken up sleeping at work instead, camping out next to the oak tree, but winter was on its way and he didn't fancy keeping it up for much longer.

Jin listened attentively, making sympathetic noises in all the right places (he didn't care much for the cold himself). "So you need a place to live," he summed up. "Within walking distance of this tree."

"Don't suggest I build myself a cabin," Nakamaru warned. "The last guy tried that. He's still out here somewhere."

The bear's paws were ill-suited for any kind of construction work; Jin could see why the suggestion hadn't been well received. Nakamaru seemed very friendly, though - quite harmless. And he was obviously responsible.

That gave Jin an idea. "How do you feel about kids?" He explained about Takizawa's house of adopted children, and how he was always taking in more, and could probably use another adult around - even if said adult was of a different species. He had plenty of space, at any rate, and had been known to take in paying lodgers before. "And the town is close enough that you can walk here every day."

Nakamaru liked the idea. "Will you write me a letter of introduction? Most humans run away screaming when bears turn up at their front doors and ask if there are any rooms available."

"I don't have anything on me to write with. If I get to my grandmother's house, I'll borrow some stationery from her and when I come back this way, I'll bring a letter with me. How does that sound?"

The bear grumbled faintly about how modern youngsters were never prepared, ignoring Jin's attempts to ask him if he had any paper other than his list of names, but agreed to the plan. "I'd better tell you how to get there, then. Take the left path."

"That's it? I was expecting some long, complicated ritual probing the true nature of my journey, and you just tell me to go left?"

Nakamaru shrugged. "Basic rule of adventuring - explore from left to right."

"And the whole thing about the paths only leading to where I'm going if I know which one to take?"

"Scares the tourists away."

Jin sighed and rose from his tree stump, preparing to continue his journey. "And I suppose the paths join up again further down the line?"

"You'll have to find that out for yourself, but there's one more thing I probably should tell you, since you've solved my problem. Good-looking young men keep vanishing in these woods. You'd better watch yourself."

Nakamaru waved a goodbye and disappeared into his tent. Jin didn't know whether to be flattered or disturbed that a bear thought he was attractive, and pulled his hood down over his eyes in the hope that he'd be safe if no one knew what he looked like.

The food parcel made it a tight squeeze but he wriggled through the left arch, as Nakamaru had said, and continued down the path. The right-hand path wasn't visible at all, being barred by a wall of branches; everything was thicker, denser, closer on this side, making Jin increasingly uneasy as he walked. If he tripped over a protruding root and broke his ankle, no one would ever find him here - excepting possibly Nakamaru, eager to find out why his letter of introduction had yet to materialise. He paid such close attention to his feet that he completely missed the branch by his ear, which snagged his hood and yanked him back with a jerk.

Jin paused to unsnare himself, startling when a snicker drifted up from near his feet.

"Didn't your parents ever teach you to watch where you're going?"

He crouched down to find the origin of the voice - a small white rabbit with a fluffy tail and a black teardrop patch on one cheek. Talking rabbits were less popular than talking bears, as most of them seemed to be in a rush to get somewhere and not inclined to stop and chat. This one was obviously in no hurry.

"My parents taught me not to laugh at the misfortune of people bigger than me," Jin retorted. Not that this had stopped his younger brother from laughing at _him_...

"What are you going to do - pull my tail?" the rabbit said. "You've got vulnerable flesh and I've got sharp teeth." He bared them for show.

Jin didn't care to be threatened by a bunny rabbit. "Excuse me."

"Wait." The rabbit scooted forwards to perch on Jin's boot. "Have you seen my master around? We got separated."

"You're a pet?"

The rabbit scratched its neck and Jin realised it was wearing a thin gold collar with a 'Koki' nametag hanging off it. "More like a guard dog...uh... _rabbit_. I make sure no bad people get near him."

"So what happened?"

"I don't know." For a rabbit, Koki sounded remarkably sheepish. "When I woke up this morning his sleeping bag was empty. We'd had kind of a lot to drink the night before so I was sleeping a little heavier than usual; didn't hear him leave but his designer sunglasses are still in the tent and he'd never have left those if he'd gone of his own free will." He pointed with one foot in the direction of a small pink tent.

Jin couldn't hide his amusement at Koki's reasoning. "Could your master have gone to take a leak?"

Koki stared at him like he'd just said the world was actually flat, or something equally preposterous. "For five hours? We didn't drink _that_ much."

"Okay, fair enough..." Jin gently nudged the rabbit away from his toes. "Unless your master's actually a bear named Nakamaru, I haven't seen him, but if you tell me what he looks like I'll look out for him."

The rabbit twitched his tail. "He's very good-looking. Criminally handsome, but somehow cute at the same time. You can't miss him."

"That's great, but what does he look like?"

It took another five minutes of Koki raving over his master's attributes before Jin managed to get a decent description out of him. Kamenashi Kazuya, answering to 'Kame', possessed, if the bunny was to be believed, such beauty as to make the very stars weep with envy. Jin wondered if his disappearance had anything to do with Nakamaru's warning about attractive young men disappearing in the woods.

"I don't suppose you know if anyone else has gone missing in these parts, do you?" he asked.

"Sorry," Koki said, "we're just passing through. Kame's supposed to be playing in a big baseball game next week on the other side of the mountains and these woods are the fastest way to get there."

Jin didn't know much about baseball - soccer was more his thing - but he had a lot of respect for athletes. "If I find him, I'll be sure to tell him to come back to your camp," he promised. "Are you going to wait here?"

Koki nodded. "It's easier to find a lost human than a lost rabbit. But I don't think he went of his own accord. Be careful."

Jin's trip to deliver a package to his grandmother was taking on a life of its own, one he wasn't sure he liked. It was all very well writing a letter of introduction for a talking bear, but searching for a guy who might've been kidnapped by hostile forces wasn't what he'd signed up for. He fervently hoped he wouldn't encounter any other talking animals in his travels.

The next line of his mother's instructions told him to follow the stream. It didn't take him long to spot it - Kame's tent was set up nearby, presumably for easy access to the water - and Jin continued away from his home, further into the woods, leaving Koki trying to sleep off the remains of his hangover.

At first the stream was crystal clear, cool and inviting, with nary a weed in sight. Jin wouldn't have thought twice about dipping his hands in and scooping up a mouthful of refreshing water...except that he'd heard one too many stories about fools drinking something they shouldn't and suffering humiliating consequences. Downstream, the water shucked its fresh transparency in favour of a thick, murky soup of reeds, insects and the bloated bodies of deceased fish that turned Jin's stomach.

Trees pressed closer, threatening with gnarled branches. Jin found himself ducking every few steps. His mother's instructions told him to follow the stream till it joined a river, cutting him off on the wrong side of a T-junction.

Not that there was any right side to this river. Brown-green soup had given way to inky blackness, swirling furiously between the banks; water to steal not just the breath from your lungs but your very soul, should you be unlucky enough to fall in. Jin gulped a mouthful of chilled air and scanned the banks for the bridge his mother had specified.

She'd neglected to mention it was a flimsy rope bridge.

Jin wasn't sure how his mother expected him to negotiate it under normal circumstances, let alone weighed down by a heavy food parcel, but it didn't look like he had any choice in the matter, short of turning back, or following the river until he found something better and hoping he didn't stray too far from his path.

If he deviated from the instructions he was liable to find himself lost in the woods forever. It had to be the bridge.

He adjusted the straps so the bag hung more evenly over his shoulders, took a deep breath, and grasped the handrails on either side. His grandmother had better appreciate all the trouble he was going to on her behalf. The first rope sank under his weight, not low enough to reach the river but more than enough to cause alarm; he quickly placed one foot on the next rung along to distribute the load. Below, the river with a million open mouths waited for him to fall.

First one step, then another. Jin slid his hands along the rails, not looking down, keeping his eyes locked on the opposite bank while he tentatively sought the next strand of rope with his feet. The whole structure wobbled with every step, clearly not happy about humans daring to use it.

Just before Jin reached the middle of the bridge, a giant fish leapt from the river, straight through the rope, and hung in the air before him. The shock almost cost him his footing; if he hadn't had such a tight grip on the handrails he'd have fallen through. The fish must've been at least six feet long and it hung upright, blocking the way forward.

After encountering talking bears and rabbits, Jin wasn't terribly surprised when the fish, which had silvery blond scales and unusually stylish fins, started speaking to him.

"Halt! Who goes there?" it said. Then it smiled brightly and added, "I love it when I get to say that!"

Jin blinked. For a fish that had just emerged from a swirling river of doom, it sounded remarkably amiable. "Um...Akanishi Jin. Can I get by, please?" He thought he might be able to squeeze past the fish if he really tried, but one flick of the tail and he'd land up in the river. Better to ask politely.

The fish sighed. "Nobody ever wants to stay and play games with me." He loomed over Jin, who had to put up with being dripped on. "Everyone's always in such a hurry."

"Games?"

"You know," the fish said. " _James Pond_ , _Robocod_ , _Attack Sub_ \- stuff like that."

"How does a fish play computer games?" Jin asked, expecting some sort of joking response.

"By proxy, of course." The fish flipped one fin in the direction of a laptop, which rested on a treestump on the opposite bank. "When I don't have anyone to play with, I just watch stuff on streaming."

Jin would've facepalmed at the joke, had it not involved taking a hand off the rail and potentially falling in. "If I...if I play a game with you, will you let me through?"

The fish backflipped with delight, almost smacking Jin in the chin with its tail. "Let's play a guessing game. If you can guess the correct password for the bridge, I'll let you cross!"

It sounded a bit vague and one-sided to Jin, who was better at games that had 'Dragonball' in the title, but anything was worth a try. "Can I have a clue?"

"It's not the Elvish word for 'friend'," the fish said. "Everyone tries that."

"Everyone?"

The fish waggled its fins merrily. "Look beneath your feet."

Reluctantly, Jin looked down, clinging tight to the handrails to keep his balance. He didn't see anything at first. One inky swirl of water looked much the same as the next, till he caught sight of a pale, bloated hand caught in the reeds by the bank. He shuddered, suddenly nauseated. Would the fish knock him in if he failed, to become one more corpse lost forever in the murky depths?

"How many guesses do I get?" he asked, not feeling terribly optimistic about his chances. Maybe it wasn't too late to turn around and follow the river till he found somewhere else to cross.

"Until I get bored." The fish bent down to look him in the eye. "I'll keep asking questions till you get the right word, okay? What was the name of Oda Nobunaga's favoured page?"

Jin wasn't great with history, but he knew this one. "Mori Ranmaru."

"Wrong!"

"Am not!" Jin spluttered. "That's definitely the right guy!"

"Right answer to the question, but the wrong password," the fish said. "Let's try another one. Who's the best pitcher in the Yomiuri Giants?"

Baseball. Great. Jin knew the name of exactly one baseball player, courtesy of his guard bunny, so he figured he might as well try it. "Kamenashi Kazuya."

The fish stared at him. "You don't even look like a baseball fan!"

"You mean I'm right?"

"Same again - right answer, but wrong password. I'll have to try something harder. What's the capital of Luxembourg?"

"Luxembourg?" Jin repeated, not even sure where it was.

"Right again." The fish blew bubbles through its lips, sulking now. "How deep is the Pacific Ocean?"

"Um..." Jin hated geography questions, unless they were about California. "I have no idea."

"You're getting closer!" the fish praised him. "Here, have another one. Recite _pi_ to a million places."

"I can't even do it to ten!"

"Getting warmer. Hit me with your best love confession."

Jin groaned. No way was he confessing to a giant fish, whether it would get him across the bridge or not. "Pass!"

The fish clapped its fins together, so violent in its excitement that it nearly overbalanced. "Almost there! You've got the first half."

"The first half of the password is 'pass'?"

The fish beamed at him. "I don't like to make it too difficult."

Jin decided to take a wild guess. "Is the password 'password'?"

With a splash, the fish dived back into the river, clearing the bridge for Jin. He ducked to avoid the spray; by the time the bridge stopped swaying the fish had popped its head above the surface.

"It's one of the most popular passwords," it said, splashing near Jin's feet. "Most people guess it eventually and go on their way."

"What about that guy?" Jin jerked his chin toward the floating hand by the bank.

"He slipped," the fish said sadly. "We were playing DDR and he lost his footing. Be careful as you cross; the bank's kind of slippery."

Jin picked his way gingerly across the remainder of the bridge, scarcely breathing till he stood safe on the other side. The fish watched him with surprisingly gentle eyes.

It couldn't hurt to ask, could it? "Uh...the guy who was playing with you and fell in, how long ago was that? Because I'm supposed to be keeping an eye out for Kamenashi, and-"

"Kamenashi? The baseball player? He came through here earlier," the fish said. "He said he was looking for someone too."

So Koki's master was still alive; good to know. But who could he be looking for in the middle of the woods?

"Any idea which way he went?"

"Same way you're about to go." The fish pointed a fin past the laptop, down through the trees. "There's only one path. Be careful as you go, though. Young men have been going missing around here lately and you don't want to be one of them."

"So I hear, but how did you know that?"

"I live in the water," the fish said. "Best place to get the current gossip."

Jin groaned but couldn't keep back a giggle, which seemed to please the fish. "Thanks for the warning...uh..."

"Junno." The fish swept one fin in front in an odd aquatic bow. "Thanks for stopping to play. I didn't mean to scare you with the threats; I just thought they might help put you in the right mood."

"I play better when I'm not terrified," Jin said.

"Then let's play again on your way back!"

Junno flipped his tail and sank below the surface, leaving Jin alone on the bank with the laptop, which was plugged into a nearby tree. Maybe it was a generator in disguise or something. Too bad there wasn't a printer or he could've done Nakamaru's letter of introduction. Jin watched the flying fish screensaver for a minute, mesmerised by the pretty colours, then remembered to check his mother's instructions.

From there they were simple: follow the path without a single deviation until he reached the clearing where his grandmother's house stood. It sounded straightforward enough. Turning his back on the river, Jin set off through the trees, keeping a close eye on the path beneath his feet. It was so narrow he didn't dare do otherwise, for fear of straying. His mother had underlined the "without a single deviation" part, so that had to be important somehow.

Crossing the rope bridge had left him feeling wobbly, the aftermath of tensing up for so long, and as he walked he felt increasingly like it would be nice to sit down for a few minutes and let his legs catch up to the rest of him. It wouldn't do to strain a muscle, after all. Though the path was relatively clear of grass, there were many small stones and twigs in his way, and he had to watch his step.

The further Jin walked, the wearier he became. Just when he thought his legs couldn't support him any further, he spotted a ring of stumps through the trees. A small clearing, unoccupied, inviting. It couldn't hurt to sit down for a couple of minutes, could it? He lifted one foot from the path, began to set it down in the direction of the clearing...and froze.

It wasn't unoccupied after all. A stray sunbeam, one of few to pierce the canopy of tree branches, caught the edge of a statue.

No...not a statue. The figure had not the substance for that. A young man, weeping into his hands as he sat on a tree stump, sharing his lament with the girl to his right. Where they fell into shadow they disappeared, bodies formed of nothing more than light.

So the ghost stories were true after all. Jin shivered, more disturbed by the sobbing human spirits than by the talking animals he'd met in the woods, and set his foot back down on the path. He no longer felt the impulse to stray.

Another ten minutes along the way the trees were thicker than ever, closing in on the path so Jin had to squeeze through with his bag of goodies. His grandmother sure lived in an awkward location. He didn't relish the prospect of the return trip; the mere thought of it left him nervous and drymouthed.

Uncomfortably so, in fact. Unfortunately he hadn't thought to bring a water bottle, his mother hadn't packed any drinks in the bag, and there were no coffee shops in the middle of the woods.

There was, however, a vending machine.

Jin paused, blinking to clear away what had to be an hallucination. Certainly, Japan had no shortage of vending machines, and it was possible to walk down a street and encounter one every ten steps, but finding one amongst the trees, no power source in sight, could scarcely be considered normal. It wasn't a brand he recognised; he strained to see the contents without removing his feet from the path. One glimpse proved fatal. The barest possibility of obtaining a cool, refreshing drink left him gasping for moisture, desperate for something to ease the raging fire in his throat.

There were no ghosts here, were there? No sobbing phantoms who'd failed to follow their mother's instructions. Jin felt in his pocket for loose change, finding enough to treat himself if only he dared to do so.

How much harm could a vending machine do, anyway? Fall on him, maybe. Steal his change. Trap his fingers in the flap. Acceptable, everyday risks. If the machine turned out to be a figment of his imagination, at least there would be no witnesses.

"Don't move!"

Jin froze in the act of lifting his foot from the path. So much for there not being any witnesses.

He risked a peek in the direction of the voice, finding a young man wearing faded blue jeans, a skull-print black T-shirt and a black leather jacket running towards him from further down the path. The stranger carried a baseball bat and wore a Giants cap over his reddish-brown hair. Koki's missing master, perhaps?

"Don't move," he repeated as he reached Jin, panting a little from the exertion. "If you step off the path, you'll end up in the vending machine."

" _In_ the vending machine?" Jin scoffed.

The stranger nodded, peering up at Jin from under the cap's bill, deadly serious. "In a water bottle. The fish told me."

Had Jin been having any other kind of day, he'd have assumed the young man was out of his mind. Instead, he felt annoyed that the fish hadn't thought to tell _him_. "So all those bottles in there...?"

"Yeah. You put your money in the slot, and that's when it sucks you in. I think it's part of the wolf's security system."

"There aren't any wolves around here," Jin said. "My grandmother wouldn't live here if there were."

"Your grandmother? And you are?"

"Akanishi Jin. Are you Kamenashi Kazuya? Your rabbit's worried about you."

"Koki's awake?" Kamenashi frowned, tilting his head so Jin could see the tiny turtle glinting in his earlobe. "I thought I gave him enough to keep him sleeping till I got back."

"You drugged your bunny?"

"No! But he can't hold his liquor. I didn't want him coming after me. It's too dangerous."

Jin looked around nervously, but other than the vending machine, the only danger in the area appeared to be from Kamenashi himself, who kept passing his bat from hand to hand.

"Kamenashi, I-"

"Are you armed?"

"Armed?" Jin took a step back. "You're not really a baseball player, are you?"

"I am," Kamenashi said, "but I do a few other things on the side. On Tuesdays I'm a pole dancer, Thursdays I'm an assassin, and Saturdays I'm a hunter."

"Seriously?"

"Nah." Kamenashi grinned. "I get Thursdays off. I'm here to find a missing friend; the game next week's just an excuse to keep Koki from worrying about me. He didn't follow you, did he?"

Jin hoped not. "He said he was going to stay put."

"Good." Kamenashi pulled off his cap and stuffed it in an inside pocket. "You should get out of here too, Akanishi. Pretty boys like you keep going missing in these woods."

"Take a look in the mirror and then take your own advice," Jin retorted, rolling his eyes. Why did everyone think he made such good prey? "I have to deliver this package to my grandmother, because my mother will kill me if I don't, and then I'm going home. I don't plan to get in your way."

"It's not safe here. Just turn around and go back, okay? There is a wolf in these woods and you're its favourite kind of snack."

"What makes you think there's a wolf? I promise you, Kamenashi, my grandmother wouldn't live here if there were wolves. She's terrified of them."

To Jin's surprise, Kamenashi pulled out his cell phone. It had no bars, of course, but it did have a bunch of surveillance photos. "See this shadow by the church? Wolf. These pawprints by the youth club? Wolf. You can just about see its muzzle in this one."

There were twenty-three photos in all, some taken of the wolf's trail in the woods, and others where Jin knew the locations well, the photos having been taken in his town. The final one set alarm bells ringing in his head. He grabbed the phone for a closer look, but there was no mistaking it.

"That's outside my house!"

Kamenashi swiped his phone back. "Hmm? Then maybe you're safest sticking with me after all. Come on, I'd like to find Ueda before he gets turned into wolf chow."

As they hurried along the path, Kame - he'd told Jin to call him that, on the grounds that if Jin were to start screaming for help, lopping the last couple of syllables off Kame's surname would speed things up - explained how his friend Ueda had gone missing after declaring his intention to go on one of those "manly" training adventures in the woods.

"He's filthy rich," Kame said, "but for some reason he enjoys challenging himself in the wilderness. I think he's trying to make up for the fact that he looks like a princess."

Jin tucked his dark, wavy hair into his hood and hoped Kame wouldn't be in the mood to make comparisons.

"When nobody could get hold of him, I arranged to play in a charity match out this way, packed up my gear, and left. I didn't realise there was a wolf involved till the kids in town started talking about seeing a big dog hanging around the outskirts. I know dogs, and _that_ is no dog."

"Um...wouldn't a gun be more useful than a baseball bat?" Jin asked.

Kame turned just enough for Jin to see his smile: sharp, deadly, and totally in control. "I don't play games with this bat."

After that, Jin kept half an eye on the bat, just in case it transformed into a sword or something cool like that. Clearly he should've paid more attention to baseball, if the players did this kind of thing in their spare time.

But as interesting as it was, traipsing through the woods with Kame, Jin couldn't help worrying about his grandmother. If this wolf did exist, she'd be terrified. While he couldn't stand the woman she _was_ his family - he didn't want to see her mauled to death by a wild animal. Maybe if he could stage a daring, last-minute rescue, she'd start to think better of him.

"Can I help? What are we looking for?" he whispered when Kame paused to remove a stone from his boot and told him to keep an eye out.

"Body parts. Torn clothing. Big furry things. Pretend you're trying to find your way to an orgy."

"Very helpful."

Jin didn't see any of that, though the dense foliage made it hard to see anything at all. Kame must've had amazing eyesight to be finding the wolf's trail in the woods. "Are there pawprints? I'm not seeing anything."

"Uh..." Kame smiled sheepishly. "I'm just following the path, like the fish told me. If I step off it, I don't think I'll be making it back to Koki. Hopefully the wolf's limited the same way."

So much for the mighty hunter. "This path only leads to one place," Jin said.

Kame pointed to a small wooden cabin up ahead. The path led right to the front door. "Is that your grandmother's house?"

"Yeah." No light appeared through the narrow windows; no welcome mat adorned the door. Jin knew the old woman wouldn't even care that he'd come to bring her tasty, homecooked food. "I'm not seeing any body parts."

Kame led the way to the front door. "Doesn't look like the wolf's been here unless he used a key."

Jin didn't have a key either, so he knocked. A familiar voice demanded he identify himself or be shot for trespassing. Kame immediately raised his bat, but Jin told him to stand down. "That's my grandmother," he said glumly. "Warm and welcoming as ever."

The old woman scowled when she found Jin on her doorstep, but changed her tune when she saw Kame. "Come in, dear," she cooed at him. "Let me get you something to drink. Perhaps a little cider? It's my own recipe, you know."

Jin stood gaping in the doorway as Kame allowed himself to be drawn inside and shown to the second-best armchair. (The best, of course, was reserved for its owner.) Jin's grandmother kept a tidy house, everything in its proper place - including the family photos on the mantlepiece, which made it painfully obvious that Jin was not in favour. He thought she'd gone a bit far, blacking out his face with a marker pen.

"Grandma, I brought-" he tried, but she barked at him to shut the door and turned, sweet as sugar, to offer Kame a tray of biscuits. Never mind that Jin might want one too, oh no. He dumped the backpack on the floor. "Mom made me bring you this stuff. There's food, you might want to do something with it..."

"Leave it in the kitchen," his grandmother said without even looking at him. "And mind you don't knock anything over."

"We should get going," Kame said politely, trying to rise to his feet without dropping the enormous tray of biscuits. "Have you seen a young man around here, hair a little lighter than mine but about the same length, has big pouty lips like your grandson?"

"My what? Oh, Reio. I don't think his lips are-"

"Not that grandson. Jin, the one standing by the door, who could probably do with a mug of that cider?"

"Oh." Jin's grandmother sniffed disdainfully, as though Jin offended her every sense merely by being there. " _Him._ He can have some water if he likes, before he goes. But you, my dear, you haven't touched your cider. Not to your taste?"

"Not during baseball season," Kame said, finally managing to offload the tray on a nearby coffee table.

"Then you must let me get you something else. You look absolutely parched, poor thing. Wait just a moment."

Jin breathed a sigh of relief when the old woman snatched up the parcel of food and swept off to the kitchen, leaving them alone in the room. He took the opportunity to swipe a biscuit from the tray when his grandmother couldn't see him. He would've had the cider, too, but Kame stopped him with a warning hand on his arm.

"No alcohol," Kame said. "You'll need your wits about you."

"Sorry about my grandmother." Jin hated feeling like he had to apologise on behalf of someone he didn't even like, but...family. "I've never seen her this friendly."

"She doesn't seem to like you much, does she? What did you do to upset her?"

Jin shrugged. "Be born, I think." He picked up one of the altered photographs. His parents and younger brother smiled brightly, oblivious to the large black hole standing between them. "This used to be a nice picture."

Kame glanced at it, then skimmed the rest of the room. It wasn't particularly warm, though there was a fire in the hearth, and Jin wished he'd thought to wear something over his hoodie. If anything, it was colder indoors than outdoors.

"Does your grandmother wear hooded sweatshirts?" Kame asked.

"No idea. Doesn't seem her style, though." Jin had only ever seen her in large, floral-print dresses and sensible shoes with the occasional shawl - "casual" wasn't in her vocabulary. "Why?"

"Because there's one behind this armchair." Kame slid the end of his bat under the garment and held it up. "Do you see a label on this?"

Jin reached inside the neck of the grey sweatshirt and found a tag with a couple of kanji even he couldn't screw up. "Ue-da?"

"He labels everything he wears to the gym," Kame said grimly. "So it doesn't get mixed up. Your grandmother never answered my question about whether or not she'd seen him."

He dropped the sweatshirt as the woman herself returned at that moment with a glass of tomato juice for Kame and half a glass of water for Jin. "Give your mother my thanks," she muttered at Jin, shoving the glass at him so fast he had no choice but to take it. "And this is for you, dear. Drink up."

Kame shook his head at the proffered juice. "Thank you, but I don't like tomatoes."

"Then perhaps some orange? I'll just be a moment."

"He doesn't want a drink," Jin blurted out, setting his water glass down on the mantlepiece and picking up the sweatshirt. "And where did you get this?"

"So rude, boy." His grandmother clucked her tongue. "You'll never amount to anything if you don't learn some manners. That must've been left here by the hiker who came through the other day. He stopped to ask for directions, I kindly allowed him to use my bathroom and he went on his way. Perhaps you'll be good enough to find him and return it."

Kame slid his hand a third of the way down his bat. "Ueda wouldn't have asked for directions."

"Ueda? Was that his name?" Jin's grandmother smiled sweetly at Kame, batting her eyelashes like a flirty schoolgirl. They were the same height. "A friend of yours?"

"A good friend, yes." Kame shrank back from the overwhelming scent of lavender, stumbling into Jin. "Do you have something in your eye?"

"Crocodile tears," Jin muttered under his breath.

"I think I might," his grandmother said. "Why don't you take a look?"

Kame gulped loud enough for Jin to hear and said, "What big eyes you have," in a voice that suggested he was aiming for a compliment but couldn't find anything genuinely nice to say.

"All the better to see you with, my dear."

"Maybe you should consider getting glasses," Jin said. "What did you do with Ueda?" He started to move towards the kitchen, intending to search the other rooms of the house for signs of life, but his grandmother seized his arm with surprising force.

He looked down at the hand gripping his upper arm. Surely his grandmother's hand hadn't always been like that, with short, thick fingers, covered in coarse black hair? He hadn't seen her in a while, of course, but he vaguely recalled her having long, elegant fingers, which she'd used to smack him away from the biscuits as a child.

Kame noticed too. "What big hands you have."

Jin's grandmother took this as an invitation to tuck Kame's hair back behind his ear with her free hand. "All the better to touch you with, my dear," she said.

Disgusting, that's what it was. Jin wrenched his arm away, horrified to discover his grandmother, who must've been ancient, was a cougar. Chasing after young men like some hormonal teenager. She obviously had no restraint whatsoever.

Kame didn't seem impressed by it either, to judge by his stony expression. "Is he here or not?"

A change came over the old woman: as the sun hid behind a cloud, so her flirtatious manner fell into shadow, leaving a sharp alertness behind. Jin felt it at once, the temperature decreasing in the already cool room.

"I think you'd both better leave now," his grandmother said in a voice of grit and gravel. "It's dangerous to walk through the woods at night."

"It's three in the afternoon!" Jin held up his watch. "It's not even dark yet!"

But it was - inside, where the narrow windows kept out all but the tiniest scraps of light, and the fire flickered and died of its own accord. Jin felt around for his cell phone, intending to use it as a torch; Kame beat him to it, shining the light straight at the old woman. It caught her in the eyes and as she opened her mouth to berate him for it, Jin decided he might not be too far off in thinking of her as a cougar.

"What big teeth you have!" he exclaimed.

His grandmother snarled at him through teeth too large to be contained by a human mouth. "All the better to eat you with!"

Jin didn't merit a "my dear", but he didn't really want one, not when the woman who gave birth to his father sprang forwards to sink her teeth into his hoodie. Inhuman teeth - but an inhuman body, too, that changed mid-leap to one considerably more lupine. Dark hair sprouted through the ugly lilac dress; scraps of fabric fluttered to the ground, torn apart by the cracking spine and contorting limbs. Hands became paws, small but more than strong enough to make Jin feel like he'd had an anvil thrown at him when they hit his chest.

His grandmother might have had the mating instincts of a cougar, but she was all wolf.

By the time Kame yelled "Get away from him!", Jin was flat on the floor, struggling to steal a breath away from the creature on his chest. The shock of being knocked to the ground left him momentarily senseless, fire surging up his spine with such intensity he felt sure he'd never be able to stand again.

It didn't look like he was going to get a choice about that, anyway. The thing that had been his grandmother weighed far more as a wolf than he'd ever imagined she could as a human, or perhaps the fear added to her weight. He almost missed her stale lavender scent; anything would be an improvement on the warm, fetid breath washing over him.

A crack split the air. The wolf rocked, tearing her teeth free of Jin's hoodie, but refused to budge; Jin heard Kame swearing from above and assumed he'd hit the creature with his baseball bat. Fresh pain bloomed in his gut as she pressed him further into the floor. If he'd had the breath to scream, he'd have brought the house down.

"Hold on, Akanishi!" Kame yelled. "I'll have it working in a second!"

 _Working?_ Jin flailed wildly with his right arm - his left being pinned by a paw - but he couldn't get anything like the amount of leverage needed to shift the wolf. His hand found tattered scraps of material clinging to soft dark fur - the only remaining sign of his grandmother's former humanity.

She snarled down at him, hatred practically dripping from her jaws as he squirmed, desperate to keep those sharp teeth away from his tender flesh. Koki's threat, so trivial from a rabbit, could be fatal from a wolf.

Another sound emerged from behind the snarl: a mechanical humming, almost too faint to be real. Jin thought he was hearing things - at least until Kame cracked the bat across the wolf's head again and lightning lit the room. The wolf collapsed.

So did Jin.

\-----

Waking up had never been fun for Jin, who wasn't a morning person at the best of times, but waking up on the floor, badly disoriented and aching all over, made him want to curl up and sleep for another hundred years. Not that he could curl so much as a finger right now.

"Akanishi?"

Jin scanned the room through half-lidded eyes till he found Kame, who'd evidently managed to get the fire going again. "Yeah?" he croaked.

Kame knelt down next to him, relief in his eyes. "I didn't want to move you in case I broke something, sorry. How are you feeling?"

"Like I wouldn't notice if something was broken," Jin said, trying for a tentative finger curl and wincing. "I had no idea my grandmother could weigh twice as much as me."

"Um..." Kame's cheeks turned pink. "You should stop thinking of her as your grandmother. It'll help later."

"Mmm?" Jin tried to turn his head to get a better view of the room. His grandmother didn't appear to be around. "I knew she didn't like me - I just didn't expect her to try to kill me."

"I don't think she was after you - she kept trying to get you out of here."

Hazy memories of Kame being flirted with and pawed surfaced in Jin's mind. "True. Good thing you didn't drink the cider."

He attempted to push himself up from the floor, but only succeeded in discovering exciting new forms of pain. His back felt like one enormous bruise.

"Easy," Kame warned when Jin was done groaning. "You hit the floor pretty hard. Maybe you should keep still for now."

"But it's not safe!"

"It's safe." Kame bowed his head. "I'm sorry, Akanishi...Jin."

And then Jin realised why his grandmother was nowhere to be seen.

"A hunter on Saturdays, huh?" A weak joke, accompanied by a weaker smile.

"Yeah."

Jin didn't ask what Kame had done with his grandmother. He didn't want to know.

"I don't need a license for a modified baseball bat." Kame began to ramble. "If I carried a gun I'd have to have all sorts of paperwork, but nobody cares if you can stun people with a piece of sporting equipment. It's actually really convenient, except when I take the wrong one out by mistake. I fried a couple of balls in practice last week, and-"

"How long was I out?" Jin interrupted.

"Long enough. A couple of hours."

Jin definitely wasn't making it back in time for dinner. "Did you find your friend?"

"Still in one piece. He's with a couple of other guys in the back room, all of them heavily sedated. She must've been dosing them periodically. Makes me very, very glad I didn't touch the cider - or the tomato juice."

"I'm glad your friend's okay." At least something good had come from this journey.

"There's...uh..." Kame licked his lips. "There's a furnace behind the house. For disposing of the remains. I found...well, I think she'd been at this a while."

"You burned her, didn't you?" Jin's voice came out thick and hoarse, but not from sadness. It was hard to be upset for himself, after what had just happened, though he thought his parents might feel otherwise.

"I had to," Kame said quietly. "We're still alive. I can't even begin to guess how many people aren't."

"Oh."

Jin lay silent while Kame searched around in the kitchen and returned with a glass of water and straw. He still couldn't sit up, too stiff to unbend. Kame helped him drink, wiping away the spillage with clean, freshly-scrubbed hands. Jin found himself looking for signs of blood anyway.

At least he hadn't spilled much of his own. His cosy red hoodie was now missing the better part of one shoulder, and the T-shirt beneath it was torn, but his flesh remained almost unbroken. Kame had made certain of that, examining him carefully for injuries. The wolf had caught him in the shoulder with a single tooth, grazing just deep enough to draw blood; a minor wound, now cleaned and disinfected.

"Your bunny's going to be frantic by now," Jin said. He couldn't see his watch, but the curtains were still open and night looked to be well on its way.

"He'll wait; Koki's absolutely loyal." Kame slipped a hand under Jin's back. "If I help, do you think you can get up? You can't spend the night on the floor, it'll just make you feel worse."

"Spend the night?"

"I can't get a signal out here, you're in no shape to walk home, and I can't leave without the sleeping beauties in the back, anyway. We're stuck here till morning."

Stuck with a couple of unconscious would-be snacks and a baseball player who danced with poles and hunted wolves in his spare time. In his dead grandmother's hou- no, in the wolf's den. Jin gave himself a mental shake. There was a wolf, and now it was dead. End of story.

With Kame's help he managed to rise, relieved that nothing appeared to be broken. His back screamed obscenities at him until he stood fully upright. At least his legs seemed to be working okay.

"Is it worth seeing if there's any ice in the house?" Kame asked.

"You are _not_ icing my entire back. I'll freeze to death."

Kame insisted on checking anyway, which is how Jin ended up lying face-down on the couch, with a teatowel full of ice resting on his lower back, which had taken the brunt of the impact and had given him the occasional problem ever since he'd fallen off a swing in his early teens. Unfortunately his front wasn't in much better condition after having the wolf barrel into him.

"Stop squirming or you'll fall off the couch."

"I can't help it," Jin grumbled. "There's no comfortable position." He tried to lie on his side, but that only made the ice pack slip.

"Here." Kame retrieved the ice pack, setting it back in place as he gently nudged Jin flat again. "You're a terrible fidget."

"I always fidget when I'm nervous."

"You're nervous?"

"You're not?"

Kame smirked. "I'm armed, remember? And this isn't out of the ordinary for me."

A very strange sideline for a professional athlete to have, Jin thought. He wasn't even going to touch the pole-dancing. "Why? I mean, isn't this kind of weird for a baseball player?"

"I'm a third son," Kame explained. "Everyone expected me to go off adventuring from the moment I could walk, but the first time I saw a baseball game, I fell in love. I just do this to keep my hand in."

"Ah."

Jin tried to nod sagely but the angle made his neck hurt. The third son always had to make his own way in life, and traditionally found fame and fortune through rescuing wealthy damsels in distress, slaying fearsome beasts, and saving endangered villages - sometimes all three at once. He'd always thought it was a full-time job. Clearly not.

"What about you?" Kame asked.

"I'm a firstborn." Jin took another sip from his glass of water, still using the straw. "I get to inherit a clothes store. But..."

Kame's eyes lit up at the mention of clothes. "But...?"

"I...um...I sing. I'm in a band with a couple of friends, and we do gigs around town, sometimes. That's what I want to do with my life - make music. My little brother can inherit." Jin sighed. "My parents are cool with it, but my grandmother thinks - thought - it wasn't a suitable career. I guess that's why she hated me; for letting the family down or something."

"I'm not so sure about that. Let me show you something I found while you were out cold."

Kame disappeared for a minute, returning with three large, leatherbound books. Photo albums. He held the first one open where Jin could see it but left it up to him to reach over and turn the pages. After the first dozen, Jin stopped, leaving Kame to flip to the end. He didn't want to see the rest.

Each page held two photos, all of them to be found in the albums at Jin's house - only in Jin's house, his face was intact. Not so here, where his grandmother had been liberal with the black marker, and even gone so far as to cut out his face in a few. From the chubby child to awkward teenager, and beyond to the more-mature-but-still-awkward man he'd become, not a year of his life wasn't represented in some way.

The other albums contained more of the same. "I think she might've been the tiniest bit obsessed," Kame said.

Jin slumped forward, not caring that he squashed his nose into the cushion. Whoever - _whatever_ \- his grandmother had been, rational wasn't it. Who put that much effort into hating someone they hadn't even seen in five years?

He felt a hand ruffle the hair at the base of his neck. Kame, offering comfort; warm fingers brushing up against bare skin for a moment before vanishing.

After a few minutes Kame returned from the kitchen with Jin's food parcel. "I think it's safe to assume anything in here won't contain a sedative," he said. "Unless your mother has a hidden agenda."

"My mother's cooking's to die for, but not literally."

No wonder the bag had been so heavy - taking out the casserole dish in the bottom lightened it considerably. Kame reheated the casserole and found them some plates and cutlery; by the time the meal was ready, Jin had managed to right himself, sitting with the ice pack carefully wedged between his back and the couch cushions. He didn't feel much like eating but hot food sounded good - he needed the warmth.

Eating took a while because Jin's shoulders hurt when he moved his arms. Kame, doing a bad job of concealing his inner neatfreak, was so impatient to do the dishes before everything congealed that he actually offered to feed Jin himself. Jin politely declined. He felt helpless enough already, moving with all the speed and grace of a centenarian. If it took him an hour to clean his plate, so be it - he'd do it under his own power or collapse in the process.

While he waited, Kame busied himself searching the house for signs of the previous victims. When Jin took a slow walk to the bathroom he discovered Kame on his knees in the bedroom, unrolling a large sheet of parchment on the floor.

"I found this in the wardrobe." Kame grabbed an alarm clock from the nightstand to hold down a corner. "Your name's on it."

Intrigued, Jin tried to peek, then realised if he sat down before reaching the bathroom he might never get there. "I'll be right back."

He wasn't, but by the time he returned, Kame had found weights for the remaining corners and the parchment took up half the floor space.

"Here." Kame pointed to a cluster of names down the end of sheet. "This is you, and I guess that's your brother?"

Jin lowered himself down onto the pillow Kame had helpfully set out for him. "Yeah, that's us. And my parents. That's my...um...that _was_ my grandmother." He pointed her out, just above his dad. "I wonder why she's written in red?"

"So are you. So's your dad." Kame leaned over for a closer look. "If the families are going left to right, all the firstborn children are in red on your father's side. Everyone else is written in black."

The family tree, for that's what it was, spanned twenty-five generations though only restricted branches: direct descendants of the firstborn child of each generation, on Jin's grandmother's side. Other children might have married and reproduced, but if so, the details weren't recorded.

"The firstborn of a firstborn of a firstborn," Kame mused. "I wonder why that makes you special?"

Jin tried to shrug and failed. "My dad's a great guy but I wouldn't say he was anything special, and my grandmother..." he trailed off.

"We know how _she_ was special," Kame said, grimacing. "You don't suppose...?"

"I think I'd have noticed if my dad turned into a wolf, Kame."

"What about this guy?" Kame pointed to a name in red further up the parchment. "Your dad's maternal grandfather. What do you know about him?"

"Not much." Jin's parents had told him stories, of course, but he'd never been good at retaining details. This one had a more memorable ending than most, though. "Uh...he was a farmer...he used to have a cottage out here somewhere...oh, and his wife killed him with a shotgun!"

Kame shuffled a couple of inches back. "Are all your relatives insane?"

"No! She just had bad eyesight, okay? They were having a problem with foxes getting into the henhouse, and when she heard one breaking in one night, she shot it. There wasn't much light. When she went over with a lantern to pick up the corpse, she discovered it hadn't been a fox after all. It's not like she hated him or anything."

"A fox." Kame licked his lips, looking very uncomfortable. "Um, Jin, you probably don't want to hear this, but when your grandmother died, her body became human again. Your great-grandfather might've been a fox."

"Mom always said he was pretty good-looking for an old guy," Jin joked, trying to make light of it. He didn't like where this was going. If his great-grandfather turned into a fox and his grandmother turned into a wolf, what did that mean for his dad? What did that mean...for him?

He didn't realise he'd started shivering until Kame wrapped a blanket around his shoulders. There was no heating in the bedroom; the temperature seemed to have dropped well below freezing in a matter of seconds. His blood had become ice water, slowly forcing its way through his veins until it stopped moving altogether.

"I don't have any proof," Kame said. "I'm only speculating, okay? It doesn't mean anything. Maybe your great-grandmother's eyesight really was that bad."

"And maybe I'm going to turn into a panther or something." Jin hugged himself under the blanket - carefully, because it hurt. "I'd know, wouldn't I?"

"I..I don't know. But I hear the talking animals were originally humans who were cursed into changing form. They kept changing back and forth till eventually they stuck in animal form, and ever since then, their descendants have had the power of speech."

 _And an appetite for video games_ , Jin thought, thinking of Junno. "Your talking rabbit, Koki? How did you find him?"

Kame grinned. "He found me. I got into a fight with this pitcher from the Hanshin Tigers and suddenly this tiny bundle of fluff leapt between us and tried to scratch his eyes out. Since then he goes everywhere with me."

"Everywhere except here."

"I didn't want him to get eaten. If he's by himself he'll hide if he sees danger coming."

Jin had trouble picturing the "guard rabbit" hiding from anything, but presumably Kame knew him best. "Must be nice to have a little friend like that. We don't have any in our house.

"Well, there's this toy poodle who lives in the neighbourhood and comes to play sometimes; my mom really likes him. That's the closest I've ever come to having a pet."

"Your mom really likes him?"

"Yeah, she's always playing games with him when he shows up. I think he just goes along with it for her cooking."

"Are your dad and the dog ever around at the same time?"

"Sure they are!" Jin closed his eyes and tried to recall a time when he'd seen the two together. Surely he must've done? Pin was a family pet, of sorts.

But try as he might, no memory came to mind, and he was forced to admit to Kame that no, he didn't remember ever seeing the two of them in the same place at the same time.

"I think that answers the question about your dad," Kame said. "At least a toy poodle's a lot nicer than a wolf? I don't think anyone's likely to try to kill him."

The bottom dropped out of Jin's world, sending him into freefall. His family had always been weird, so he thought, but this was utterly ridiculous. He stared at the family tree, thought about the men and women who'd come before him. People he'd never met, who'd lived and died long before he'd been born. What might they have been? Playful, gentle creatures, or fierce, hungry killers?

Kame let the silence hang for a bit, giving him space. Jin continued to stare, scarcely noticing when Kame rolled up the parchment. It didn't matter that there were no longer any names before his eyes; he fixed on the cracks between the floorboards instead.

When even those began to blur, Kame tapped his knee, bringing everything back into focus. "Hey. You're not your grandmother, or your great-grandfather, or any of the people we have no idea about. You're not even your dad. You're you, whoever that turns out to be."

"Or whatever."

"Either way, I think you need to talk to your parents. Maybe they can tell you something."

"It would've been helpful if they'd told me about my grandmother before sending me here," Jin said tightly. "Less chance of me getting killed."

"I still don't think she was trying to kill you - if she'd succeeded, the line of firstborns would've ended with you. Maybe that's why you're blacked out in all the pictures, because you're off-limits. She couldn't kill you, so she killed a whole bunch of other young men instead."

"If this is supposed to cheer me up, it's not working."

"Sorry. But she could've torn you to pieces. All she did was rip your clothing a little and knock you down."

"It still hurts," Jin pointed out.

"Better than ending up like..." Kame waved his hand in the direction of the furnace, and Jin had to agree.

Kame fixed the blanket more snugly around Jin's shoulders and left to check on Ueda and the others, who were bound to wake up at some point and would no doubt be in quite a state. Jin spent the next ten minutes trying to ease himself back to his feet, using the side of the bed for support. Sitting down on the pillow had been a mistake.

"Still asleep," Kame said when he returned. "Are you comfortable like that?"

Jin had one hand on the edge of the bed, the other halfway down the bedspread, and one knee still on the floor. He glared up at Kame. "Does it look like I'm comfortable?"

"It looks like you're Sadako trying to crawl out of the television."

Horror movies. Jin didn't fare well with those. He stubbornly ignored Kame's offers of help until his other leg gave out and he had to accept a pair of steadying hands pulling him upright.

"It'll be worse in the morning," Kame said. "Better move while you still can."

"It's worse _now_." Jin patted his left shoulder. "It's throbbing and making everything else feel worse."

"Where you were bleeding? Let me have a look."

The injury was actually small enough to require only a plaster, but when Kame tugged Jin's torn T-shirt aside to remove it, it quickly became obvious that complications had set in. Jin couldn't see much until he looked in a mirror, and then...

"I thought you disinfected it?" he asked Kame.

"I did! I..." Kame touched a fingertip to the plaster, now stuck on a swollen purple patch the size of his fist, so sensitive Jin gasped and pulled away immediately. "Sorry!"

"I'm going to die because I let myself be talked into delivering a stupid food parcel," Jin moaned. His whole body pulsed in time with the wound, his rhythms gradually adapting themselves in a quest to become one thrumming, swollen mass of flesh. He seized Kame's arm for balance, too unsteady to keep his feet unaided.

"Maybe you'd better sit down."

Kame had to help Jin sit on the edge of the bed; once there he doubled over as pain shot up the inside his spine, forcing him not to straighten up but to curl in on himself. Sitting upright proved impossible. Another spasm hit; Jin's feet left the floor. The cramped position made it hard to breathe but he kept trying, drinking in huge gulps of air whenever he could, mostly so he could keep repeating, "I'm going to die".

"You're not going to die," Kame assured him, not sounding terribly convincing. He wore an encouraging smile, to be sure, but it faltered whenever Jin blinked.

"I'm going to die."

"You're not going to die."

"Find my parents and tell them I loved them."

"Tell them yourself." Kame sat down on the bed and stroked a gentle line down Jin's back. "Hey, your spine feels kind of-"

Exactly how his spine felt, Jin never got to hear, because the sound it made as it snapped drowned out Kame's voice.

The next two minutes rushed past in a blur of pain and nausea: bones grinding against each other as they shrank down to near nothing, fur forcing its way through reluctant skin, tiny claws sprouting from the ends of all four limbs. Jin tried to scream but couldn't find the breath in his shrinking lungs. The world grew before his eyes, spinning larger and larger until the dizzying circles stopped, and he realised his feet were so far away from the ground that he might as well have been sitting on the edge of a cliff.

And Kame! Looking down at him with wide, horrified eyes. Down from such a height...

"Jin?" Kame whispered. "Can you still hear me?"

Jin opened his mouth to respond and got the shock of his life when his teeth turned out to be longer - and sharper - than they should've been. He had to speak carefully to avoid lisping. "I can hear you." Why was his voice so high? And so quiet? Why were his clothes lying on the bed?

"Thank goodness." Kame's eyes narrowed a little. "Don't...don't be alarmed. I'm going to get a mirror; just sit tight for a second."

"Sitting", tight or otherwise, was proving to be a little uncomfortable, as Jin must've been on some kind of fluffy cushion that stopped him leaning back. At least he didn't feel so stiff and bruised anymore.

When Kame returned with a small handmirror, he found out why.

"You have a very cute tail?" Kame offered.

"I don't want a cute tail!" Jin turned sideways to get a better look at it. It did curve pretty nicely, he had to admit - a reddish-brown bush arching over his back, matching his fluffy, tufty ears and the bulk of his fur, save the creamy white underbelly and dark, beady eyes. For a creature less than ten inches tall, he cut quite a stylish figure.

But he still didn't want to be a squirrel.

"I hate my family."

"You don't hate your family," Kame said. "You just don't want to be a squirrel."

"Would _you_ want to be a squirrel?"

"Well...no, but there are worse things you could be, right? And I don't think you're going to be stuck like that forever." He ran a finger lightly over the bush of Jin's tail, smiling when Jin squeaked and scampered away. "Your dad obviously doesn't spend all his time as a toy poodle; I think you'd have noticed."

Jin ran across the bedspread and up a pillow, finally climbing up to the top of the headboard so he could talk to Kame without feeling like a midget. Squirrel claws had to be good for something. Kame sat down next to the pillow, managing to keep his hands to himself.

"Pin didn't even start showing up till about ten years ago."

"And you've never turned into a squirrel before, right?" Kame's brows furrowed in thought. "Did anything strange happen to your dad before the dog first appeared?"

"You expect me to be able to think seriously about anything when I'm like this?"

"I appreciate that your brain's just shrunk, but try anyway."

Jin sighed, rubbing his forepaws together as he scrabbled around in his memory for anything that might be relevant. It was really hard to focus when he had a terrible craving for chestnuts. "Um...he won an award for looking good in hats?"

"Perhaps something a little less positive?"

"Um...oh!" This had to be it. Jin couldn't think of anything else. "He used to go hunting sometimes, back when there were still deer in these woods. One day he came back bleeding, said he'd had a run-in with a wolf." He paused, then added, "Come to think of it, that was just before my grandmother moved all the way out here. She used to live a lot closer to us."

"Must've been her," Kame said. "The timing's too perfect."

"She drew blood from my dad, he plays fetch and wags his tail. She drew blood from me, I chitter higher than a chipmunk and would kill for a chestnut."

"So maybe it's always in your genes, and that's what activates it? Being bled by someone else who's got it? And that's why it hasn't happened to you till now."

"I definitely need to talk to my dad." Jin tried to settle his tail more comfortably but overbalanced, tumbling down onto the pillow when he couldn't dig his claws into the headboard in time.

Kame burst out laughing while he lay there in a daze. "This is better than YouTube!"

Jin gave him his best indignant look, which mostly involved angling his whiskers at a suitably disapproving angle. It worried him how naturally the movement came. He _wasn't_ a squirrel, damnit. He was a human being, a young man with hopes and dreams and a battered six-string with which to convey them. He had two legs, not four. He didn't have claws. He didn't have whiskers. He didn't have a big, bushy tail that trailed along behind him like a permanently attached body pillow.

But for the moment, he had all these things. He had a body that moved, swift and light, wherever he wanted it to. He had powerful hind legs that let him leap beyond his reach.

And he had soft, beautiful fur that made people want to stroke it, the way Kame was doing now.

"Sorry," Kame said. "I couldn't resist. I love animals, and you're..."

"Not an animal," Jin said, but he didn't ask him to stop, either. It felt kind of nice to be petted, though he didn't generally like people touching his head as a human. Kame had gentle fingers, clearly used to handling animals; Jin wondered if Koki got petted like this.

"Tell me if I press too hard, okay?"

Content for now, Jin nuzzled the short, strong fingers while their owner recollected all the stories he'd heard about talking animals and their origins. Some were interesting; none were pretty. There was the one about the servant who'd stolen money from his master and had a curse placed upon him, that he might become an animal who could never use the money for himself. Or the one about the witch who'd turned her cheating lover into the pig she thought he resembled, only letting him return to human form on those nights when she had a use for him. The most upbeat of the bunch involved a woman who'd fallen in love with a woodland god and been "blessed" with the ability to shift into one of his creatures.

"I hope the stories aren't true," Jin said. "I don't want to be a squirrel forever. Dad would chase me round the garden."

"There must be a way for you to change back. Maybe if you focus hard on being human?"

Jin scratched his cheek with a forepaw. "I've been trying that since you made me look in the mirror. No luck."

Kame refused to be deterred. "Maybe it's a time-based thing and you have to wait it out. If you're still a squirrel in the morning I'll make sure you get home okay. Your dad should know what to do."

The idea of making his way home through the woods in squirrel form - especially across the rope bridge - terrified Jin. On the other hand, so did showing up at home like this. His brother would never let him live it down.

"I promise," Kame said. "I can carry you home. We'll have to stop for Koki on the way."

That wasn't the only thing they had to stop for. "I need to write an introductory letter for a bear and play games with a fish," Jin said, feeling ridiculous but knowing Kame would understand.

"Then I'd better let you get some rest." Kame gave him one final rub behind the ear and pulled away. "It's pretty late. Let's worry about getting you back in the morning."

He disappeared out the door before Jin could argue. Jin flailed about on the bed for a bit, wondering if he was going to have the place to himself all night and if so, how he was going to switch off the light, when Kame returned and began stripping off his shirt and jeans.

"There's only the one bed." Kame sounded embarrassed. "I mean, it's big enough for two but with you like this..."

"Just don't squish me."

One pillow went on top of the bedspread for Jin, where Kame couldn't accidentally roll on top of him in the night, and Kame slipped beneath, clad in just his underwear - and that, he'd confessed, he was only wearing because he was with company. At home he'd be naked.

Jin didn't care what Kame wore, so long as he didn't roll around the bed in his sleep. Sharing a bed wasn't something he did often; sharing one with a man nearly eight times his height was quite outside the realm of his experience. He curled up on the pillow, forepaws tucked under his chin and his tail snuggled close, and waited to fall asleep.

After an hour of lying in the dark, sleep had yet to find him and rolling around restlessly only carried him off the pillow, down towards Kame. He, at least, seemed to be getting some sleep; his soft, regular breaths provided a soothing alternative to the silence of a dead woman's house. Knowing his grandmother hadn't meant for any of this to happen didn't make it any easier for Jin to be lying in her bed, in a house so full of tragic memories and twisted emotions that it deserved to be burned to the ground.

Jin crept close enough to find the gap between Kame's body and the covers. He tried to be stealthy, but with a tail like his, it was hard to keep from tickling him in his sleep. Fortunately Kame didn't appear to be ticklish. He stirred slightly when Jin settled down beside him; nothing more than a brief sigh. Exhausted by his long day and comfortable sharing Kame's warmth, Jin found sleep much easier to come by now.

\-----

Come morning, Jin almost wished he'd stayed on his pillow. He'd still have been embarrassed by waking up naked in the company of a man he'd only met the previous afternoon, but at least he'd have been spared the indignity of waking up naked _and spooning with_ that selfsame man, himself wearing only a pair of briefs.

Perhaps he could extricate himself before Kame woke up. He inched forwards, slowly making his way to the other side of the bed, but Kame's breaths against his shoulder changed in pattern and he knew it would be useless to keep trying.

"'Morning," Jin mumbled, glad Kame couldn't see his face.

"'Morning." Kame threw one arm over Jin's chest and gave him a quick squeeze. So much for escaping. "You're not a squirrel anymore!"

"And I'm not in agony either." Jin had been worried that returning to normal would bring all the pain rushing back, but evidently shapeshifting had some pleasant side-effects. "You won't have to carry me home."

"I couldn't do it now, anyway." Kame laughed, a husky, drink required, first thing in the morning laugh that sang through Jin's skin to the blood and bones beneath. "You're much lighter as a squirrel. Much more fun to pet, too." He smoothed down a handful of Jin's hair to illustrate, caught his fingers in a tangle and gave up. "See?

Jin shook his hair free, then returned to his original plan of putting some distance between himself and Kame. It didn't work very well, largely because Kame followed him across the bed.

"If you were still a squirrel this morning," Kame began, "I was going to sit you on my shoulder while we walked. Like a pirate's parrot, but cuddlier. I always wanted to be a pirate."

"Couldn't fit it into your schedule?"

"Can't be at sea and at practice." Kame stopped just short of slotting himself up against Jin's bare back. "I'm on the road a lot. If I...when I'm next around here, would it be okay if I took you for lunch or something? I kind of feel like I owe you. Not that lunch makes up for it, but-"

"If anything, you owe my dad." Jin had no idea what he was going to tell his parents about his grandmother. "Come back with me and explain to him why his mother's dead."

"I'd planned on it, whether I had to carry you back or not."

"You saved my life," Jin said, pleased that Kame hadn't been intending to leave him by himself to make the awkward explanations. "Probably. So you don't owe me anything."

"Can you turn around so I don't have to talk to your back?"

"My clothes are on the floor. And I mean _all_ my clothes."

"Being in bed with a naked man is not going to bother me, trust me."

Reluctantly, Jin rolled over, holding himself right on the edge of the bed till Kame backed up a little to give him space. "You really don't have to buy me lunch to make up for saving my life, honest."

"Okay; then," Kame's smile was far too bright for someone who'd only just woken up, "can I buy you lunch just because I'd like to spend some time with you that doesn't involve violence, shapeshifting, and demented relatives?"

There was something to be said for the straightforward approach. Jin couldn't help but laugh. "You wait until we're both practically naked in the same bed to ask me out on a date?"

"At least I didn't ask while you were a squirrel," Kame said. "I didn't want you to get any ideas about me."

"You just like me for my tail, don't you?"

"Not just your tail. Your ears are pretty cute too. So soft, and furry, and-"

"This isn't helping me not get ideas about you."

"You can ask Koki for a character reference?"

"I don't think that would help," Jin said. "Your bunny has a very obvious crush on you."

"It's not mutual!" Kame protested, though both of them were far too amused to take the notion seriously.

"In that case..." Jin's laughter faded. He didn't want to turn Kame down flat, and he certainly wasn't opposed to the idea of going out and seeing what happened, but the current situation was less than ideal. He didn't want Kame thinking of him as some weird squirrel guy with crazy relatives. "Come back and see me when I'm playing a gig. You've just seen me about as low as I'm ever going to get. You should see me at my best, too."

"I could take a peek under the bedspread for that," Kame teased, so Jin hit him with a pillow until he agreed. "All right, all right, no peeking. But I'd like to see that sometime. You've seen what I do, so show me what you do."

"I've never seen you play baseball," Jin said. "And you're only a hunter on Saturdays, right? Today's Sunday. What do you do on Sundays?"

"Apparently I play escort to semi-conscious men, play games with fish, make excuses to panicked rabbits, explain myself to parents of prospective boyfriends and hope they don't have me arrested." Kame propped himself up on one elbow and grinned across the bed at Jin. "After breakfast. I'm pretty sure I can find something in your mom's food parcel to feed us all. Any requests?"

Jin's stomach growled at the mention of food. It wasn't in the direction he expected. "I could really go for some nuts..."


End file.
